“Over
a couple year period, it’s interesting, the United Church of God had media
experts come in and look over everything we did, and say ‘OK, what are these people all about?’And they came up with a mission statement
which was basically what we already had, and a vision statement which was what
we already had.And to media they came
up with an “essence statement.”An
essence statement is something you don’t say, but it’s what you’re all
about.And they said, ‘Oh, you people are about relationships,
loving God with all your heart and mind and all your soul, and loving your
neighbour as yourself.’And I
thought, ‘Wow! I could have said that,
and not paid them the money.’We
knew that.In fact, we didn’t learn
anything.It was amazing, we really
didn’t learn anything, because we already knew all that stuff.So we paid people to come in and tell us what
we already knew.But God is reconciling
us to himself because he wants us to be his children.He wants to relate to us as his
children.And in those two sermons I
went through and I asked you to write down these five points, because we will
go through them over and over again.I
thought we would do this in three sermons, this is going to take more, to go
through the complexity of this whole concept.But I said we have conflict in our lives, or dysfunctional conflict,
conflict is normal, not all conflict is bad.Now when people have a problem, and they have a couple different
viewpoints to solve the problem, and they work together to come up with a
solution, that’s not bad.Not all
conflict is bad.When conflict helps
people work together to create a positive solution, it’s actually good.But that’s not what we usually experience,
between whether it’s in our families or inside the Church, and what I’m talking
about specifically here is conflict between Christians.We can try to apply these principles to the
world, but they don’t play by the same rules.So we have to understand that.But between ourselves, when we look at dysfunctional conflict, there’s
reasons for that.And in the very first
sermon I said “Write these down.”I said, 1. Pride, 2. The need to be
emotionally healed when we’re hurt, 3. We have expectations that others will
satisfy our needs and desires, that’s the third one, we have all these
expectations of people.And when other
people don’t meet our expectations there’s conflict.4. Fourth is the need to control, because of
our problem with, we need emotional stability.We also have a self-image, I talked about how we are, we make ourselves
our own gods, which is part of the problem, we make ourselves our own
gods.And so we have this need to
control.And then I said the number one
reason for conflict in our lives is that we all have a conflict with God.We spent a great deal of time in that first
sermon going through what it means, that by nature we are the children of
wrath, by nature.What it means when the
carnal mind, the natural mind is the enemy of God.We went through what the word “abomination”
means, and how we are the enemies of God.In our natural state we are enemies of God.And then we went through and showed how there
is a great chasm between God and humanity, and how he closed that chasm by
having Christ come across the great chasm, across the great canyon, and became
a human being.And that’s what we
celebrate at the Passover, was his life and his death.And we’re celebrating now his resurrection,
because it’s not just getting the unleavened bread out, it’s taking the
unleavened bread in.It’s taking Christ
in all the time.And so how we
understand, while we were yet enemies, before we repented, forgiveness was
offered to us.In fact, it’s by his
goodness that leads us to repentance.We
went through in where Paul taught that.And we talked about this ministry of reconciliation.Let’s go to 2nd Corinthians 5,
because this is where we started from.And this is where this series of sermons is leading.And so, in that first sermon, we really
understood how desperate we are.How we
truly are, without God we’re nothing.We
are separated [from God], we are enemies, we can’t cross the gap, we can’t do
anything.And no matter how good we try
to be, our nature has already been corrupted, and this is more than just about
doing sin, it’s about the very core of who we are.It’s been so corrupted, we can’t get back
across.We talked about what it is to be
made in the image of God, and how all of us were made to be in the image of
God, and now we’re such corrupted images, we don’t look anything like what
we’re supposed to look like.And it is
the love of God, while we were enemies he crossed that barrier.And that’s what we just celebrated.2nd Corinthians 5:18, “And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us
the ministry of reconciliation;”This concept of reconciliation doesn’t mean we just learn to get
along.This is more than God just
saying, ‘I’d like to have you get along
with me, or maybe we can open some lines of communication, maybe we can do
lunch someday.’Reconciliation means
to restore, come into a relationship.In
this case, Father to child, Brother to brother and sister.That’s how he describes it.So we’re to come into a Father-and-child relationship
with God, a Brother-to-sibling relationship with Jesus Christ.That’s an elder brother, with all the respect
that is due and the worship that he’s due.So “all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to
himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of
reconciliation.To wit, that God was in
Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto
them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.Now we are the ambassadors for Christ, as
though God did beseech you by
us:we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the
righteousness of God in him.” (verses 18-21)And this is the premise, this is where we have
to start this discussion.That’s what we
did in our first sermon, and realized what God is doing to bring us into a
relationship with him.The second sermon
was about how then he had to do something else.He had to pour out his Spirit upon us.In other words, he had to bring us back across the gulf, he sent Christ
here, and how he was a human being with a divine nature, while we still all
have a corrupt human nature.So he had
to put the divine nature in us, so we received God’s Spirit.And now we are at war, we are at war within
ourselves, with the corrupt human nature and a divine nature.And in that, we can learn peace.We talked about peace.“Blessed
are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.”But peace must begin internally.And so we showed then, in the second sermon,
how we understand Christ’s sacrifice, and we receive God’s Spirit, how that
deals with our conflict with God, how that deals with all the things we had
talked about in terms of the reasons for conflict.How we must repent, repentance is required
for relationship.But God does the
initiation.And we talked about how
unique it is that as human beings, when we are offended, our approach is, ‘You’re the one who is wrong, you must heal me.’And how God’s response
[to being offended] is ‘You’re the one who was wrong, I must heal
you.’Totally different
approach.God approaches us as the
offenders, as the abominations, with the intent of healing the offender.We should be very, very, very glad that God
is not like us, that he needs our healing.Because if God needed our healing, he would wipe us off the face of the
earth.He’d have destroyed humanity a
long time ago.And we showed how
receiving God’s Spirit, understanding God’s ways, helps us to be able to have
that conflict between us and God resolved, it helps us to be able to learn how
to not need to control our own lives so much, but to give it to him in
faith.How also, we found God’s answer
to that need to satisfy expectations of others, and why we fail so much in
that, and how God can help us with that.We showed, or we saw how because of the reconciliation process, and
receiving God’s Spirit, we can be emotionally healed from our conflict we’ve
had, and our enmity towards God.And we
showed how God deals with our pride, by helping us understand our absolute
poverty without him, our absolute spiritual poverty without him.Unfortunately, I have found in life that
there are many people who keep the right doctrines of God, that do not have a
poverty before God.And it is pride much
of the time that drives us and motivates us, and causes us to have conflicts
with others.

Next Step:How Do I Apply What God Is Doing In Reconciling Me To Him, In Dealing
With Others?

So,
we saw in the first two sermons how God is reconciling us to him, and how that
affects us.But once we learn that, then
we have to take the next step.And that
is, ‘OK, how do I now apply what God is
doing in reconciling me to him, in dealing with others?’ And now we have the concept of family
relationships.If the Father and the
Elder Brother reconcile us to them, when we have problems between each other,
when we have offenses between each other, how does that get reconciled?Now what I want to talk about today is the
message to the person whose been offended.Now if you’ve been offended, the first thing you say is ‘Well, well, wait a minute, the first
message should always be to the offender, the first message should always be to
the offender.’Well, actually, as
the offended person we have a responsibility to go to the offender in
Scripture.We’ll get to that.When it’s our brother and sister [in Christ],
and remember God reached out to us as the offenders before we repented.He reached out to us willingly, offering
forgiveness, before we even admitted we were wrong.In fact, you and I never admitted we were
wrong until he did what he did.So, we
then, as the person who has been offended in a situation, have a certain
responsibility to follow that example.Remember, repentance is the human response to having committed a sin,
whether against God, or against somebody else.Forgiveness is the Christ-like behavior of the person who has been
offended.Repenting, repenting is the
human, the required human response to having sinned against God or somebody
else.Forgiveness is the Christ-like
behavior of the person who has been offended.

Step One:Getting The Strength To Do It God’s Way

So
now that we understand how God has reconciled us, we must understand how to
reconcile to each other.So, let’s go
through, I had you write down those five things, because those were the five
points in the first sermon, they were the five points in the second sermon,
they’re going to be the same five points in this sermon.You’ve been offended by somebody else,
somebody has sinned against you.You
feel betrayed, you’re obsessed, you feel frustrated, you feel bitter, you feel
angry, you feel hurt.What are you supposed
to do?What are we supposed to do?Let’s go through the five steps, starting in
the order we went through them in the last sermon, which we started with your
conflict with God.And we say, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, this person
sinned against me, why do I start with my conflict with God?My conflict’s with that person because they
sinned against me.’And that’s
true.We’re not denying that, we’re
basing this from, we’re starting this with “You’re the person whose been
offended.”You’re the person in which
someone has committed a sin against.You
say, ‘Now the first thing I should do is
go talk to that person.’No, the
first thing you should do is go have God make sure and deal with the conflict
you have with God.That’s the first
thing you do.That doesn’t make sense to
us, but realize, if you were going to forgive that person, and you’re going to
offer forgiveness, if we’re going to follow God’s example of ‘I
forgive you before you repent,’ that’s his example, if I’m going to
follow God’s example, I can’t do that myself.That is a Christ-like behavior, that is not human behavior.So if I’m going to do this Christ-like
behavior, guess where I must go to get the strength to do it?So before you ever go deal with the offender,
you must go deal with you and God, and make sure there’s a healing between you
and God. Now this gives us, there’s a
point where we have to say something about forgiveness.Forgiveness doesn’t mean you ignore the
offense.Now, we’ll see that there are
occasions when it does.In a general
sense, it doesn’t mean you ignore the offense.It doesn’t mean you pretend that the sin didn’t take place.It doesn’t mean somehow we erase God’s
standards of right and wrong.Forgiveness
means you give up the need to make that person meet your expectations, or to
suffer if they don’t.It means
deciding not to become obsessed with the offense.I’ve met people who are obsessed with
offenses that took place twenty-five years ago.They’re just obsessed with it.They think about it all the time.It eats away at them all the time.It means that you do not gossip about the offense to other people.And it means that you give up the animosity
you have towards the offender.That’s
what forgiveness means.Now there’s
still a standard they’re held to.This
has nothing to do with the standard.It
has to do with ‘you and me.’That’s what forgiveness is.You know, when God says ‘I forgive you,’ he doesn’t say ‘’I forgive you, I just did away with the standard.’What God says is ‘I no longer, I don’t have any
animosity towards you, I have no anger towards you, I don’t care anymore about
what you did, it means nothing to me.It
is erased from my memory.’You
know, God can choose to remember our sins, but he chooses not to remember
them.So forgiveness isn’t taking away
the standard, forgiveness is what you do in your own mind and in your own
heart.The problem is, that when we’re
sick, think about it, when we’re sick, you know, you’re sitting in a room and
you’re sick, and you’re in that room long enough, there’s only one thing that’s
on your mind, how sick you are.I mean,
you can’t think of anything else.‘I’m going to throw-up again,’ right?At that moment you’re not thinking about how
much you should love your wife or your kids, and serve the people in the
church, and all you’re thinking about is ‘I
feel miserable, I hurt.’That’s what
we do when we obsess about someone who has offended us.We think about it all the time, until we find
ourselves emotionally in a dark room, locked in by ourselves, thinking about ‘how sick I am.’That’s an obsession.That’s what happens when we don’t
forgive.We become obsessed, and we lock
ourselves into a spiritual dark room, and we just sit there, and all we do is
think about, and feel about the person who has offended me.Forgiveness doesn’t mean you excuse the
person’s actions, they have a responsibility.But, now I want you to think about this, it means, now if we’re going to
be Christ-like, it means that you are willing to go across the gap created by
that person.Right?The person created a gap between you and
them, just like you and I created a gap between us and God, and you and I can’t
get across the gap, so he had to come across to his enemies.Right?He had to come across to his enemies.You and I have to reach the point where we are willing to go across the
gap to offer forgiveness to the enemy.That’s what we have to be willing to do, if we’re going to be
Christ-like.You say, ‘How did you make that up?’Well we’ve already gone through what God did
for us.How many times Paul in Ephesians
says ‘Follow
God as little children, imitate God as little children, become Christ-like.’‘Well
OK, I’m not stealing.’But,
how about crossing the gap for the enemy?That’s what he did.Now in order
to be willing to do that, you have to go get strength from God.That’s why when someone’s offended you, you
know, if your husband has offended you, before you go confront him, go get
right with God, go get right with God first.Let him show you what you’re supposed to do and how to do it.That’s what makes Matthew 18 so
important.Now there is a point where we
will go to Matthew 18 as conflict resolution.Matthew 18 gives us a model of conflict resolution.But I’m not going to go through the model
today, because we’re not even talking about how you do this.We have to start with, as the person who is
offended, how, what I must do internally, to be a peacemaker, to have peace
myself?Because I’ve been damaged by
somebody else.Other people damage
us.And you know what, we damage others
too.Anyone, everyone in this room has
been damaged, and everyone in this room has damaged somebody else.And we never really will come to grips with
this until we accept one, yes I have been damaged by others, and two, yes I
have damaged others, and I must take responsibility for that.In fact, in most cases of conflict, both
parties have damaged the other.That’s
why the conflict is dysfunctional.The
reason there is dysfunctional conflict, the reason it becomes dysfunctional is
both parties have damaged each other.And
so here we have in Matthew 18, verse 21, how many times have we read this, “Then
came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and
I forgive him?till seven times?”What a spiritual giant.I would say, ‘Once, maybe twice.’Right?Fool me once, no, no, fool
me twice, never again.He says ‘Seven times, perfect number, boy am I going
to look righteous to the disciples, and Jesus is going to say ‘Bless you.’’ “Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee,
Until seven times: but, Until seventy
times seven.” (verse 22) He said, ‘What!?Hey, that much forgiveness?’And then he tells them the parable about the
man who had owed a king a huge amount of money, and went to the king and said, ‘I can’t pay it,’ and the king said ‘I forgive you.’He says ‘Please
forgive me.’ The king says, ‘I
forgive you.I will wipe out the
account.I will erase it.Just go be a good citizen.’And he leaves the king, and there comes
to him a person who owes him a very small amount of money.And the person who owes him a very small
amount of money says ‘Look, I can pay
you, just give me some time.’And he
says ‘No,’ and he throws him into
debtors prison, and he has him tortured.He has him pay his debt by throwing him into prison.And he owes him just a small amount of
money.And so the servants go and tell
the king.And the king calls the man in
that he had forgiven.Verse 32, “Then his lord, after that he
called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt,
because thou desiredst me:shouldest not
thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on
thee?”He begged him, he could not
pay the debt.This is where you and I
come before God, you and I can’t pay the debt.We are the offenders, we are the abominations, and we can’t pay the
debt.And we forget that, and that’s why
I said in each of these sermons, life changes when you live the Passover
year-round.When we live it once a year,
we have problems.Life changes when we
live the Passover year-round, when you remember every day, ‘I have gone to God, and I
couldn’t pay the debt, and I owed it, and he said, ‘I forgive you.’’Verse
33, “Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as
I had pity on thee?And his lord was
wroth and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due
unto him.”Verse 35, Jesus says, “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do
also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother
their trespasses.”‘so shall my heavenly Father do TO EACH OF YOU, if each of you from his
heart does not forgive his brother his trespasses.’When we refuse to forgive, God will turn us
over to the torturers.We torture
ourselves.We live in a dark room where
all we can think about is our sickness.This is why we’re starting the message to the people who have been the
offendees, people who have been offended.The offenders,when we come to
them, there are strong messages about offending, about sinning against your
brother.And you think about six of the
Ten Commandments are about---what?---sinning against your brother.Stealing, lying, killing, sinning against our
brother is terrible.In fact, when we
sin against our brother, we sin against God.

One Of The Most Dangerous Things We Face In
Church---Being Offended By Another Christian

But
what’s amazing in life, here’s one of the great ironies in life, there have
been as many people turning against God, not because they committed the sin,
the initial sin, but because they became bitter over the person who sinned
against them. In fact, one of the most dangerous things we face in the Church
is when we are offended by another Christian.When another Christian sins against us, it is one of the most dangerous
things we face. [I know a wonderful young gal who is an atheist primarily
because she was ‘abused’ as a child, and asked ‘where was God when I needed him?’A very close friend of mine, an ex-Worldwide member, became an atheist
because of the offenses and sins committed against him by members of ‘the
church.’One example in the world, one
right within our past membership in the Church.]Because we end up in a dark room, sick,
thinking only about our own pain.And it
is impossible to love, God or a fellow man, in that state.It is impossible to be what we’re supposed to
be, remember we’re supposed to be the children of God.We are corrupted images of God.And God is recreating us into his image.And God is not a sick, emotionally sick
person in a dark room.That’s not who he
is.When we obsess over the offense, we
become driven by our hurt and our anger and our bitterness.And that’s normal.When you feel hurt, I feel hurt when people
do something to me, and I know other people are hurt when I do something to them.That hurt is normal.

1st Step In How To Do It God’s Way

But
we also have to remember, we must deal with that, and the first thing we do
when we’re hurt is go recognize your poverty before God.Go read the last part of Matthew 18, and
realize your poverty before God.And
before you deal with somebody else, go say ‘God
forgive me, for I am also a sinner.Forgive me, for I am also a sinner.And then give me the capability of reaching back across the gap to the
person who has sinned against me, to offer forgiveness, give me that ability.’Because he says if we don’t we will be turned
over to the torturers.That’s what it
says.We will be tortured in our own
minds when we refuse to offer forgiveness.Now, you can offer forgiveness, when we get into reconciliation, the
techniques of it, you can offer forgiveness and somebody won’t repent. That’s a
whole different story.They refuse
it.But you know, even with people repenting,
it usually takes time.Very seldom does
someone just repent immediately.Think
about you and God, how long did God have to work with you before you were
baptized?Sometimes it’s decades before
you repented.Colossians 3.Remember what we just read there, is when we
refuse to forgive somebody, when you offer forgiveness it means you’ve already
forgiven them.Once again it doesn’t
mean you have a relationship with them, it means you’ve already forgiven
them.God already forgave us, or he couldn’t
have offered it to us.People go to the
lake of fire because they refuse God’s forgiveness.That’s why they go.Colossians
3:12, “Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of
mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering” these are
hard things, tender mercies, being willing to cut other people slack, being
willing to offer forgiveness, being willing to be merciful when others are
wrong.You don’t give mercy to people
when they’re right.There’s no need to
give mercy to somebody whose right.Kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering, “forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a
quarrel against any:even as Christ
forgave you, so also do ye.” (verse
13)There’s no need to bear with one
another unless the other person’s being obnoxious.So this statement has no meaning unless
something bad is happening.“forbearing one another, and forgiving one
another, if any man has a quarrel against any:even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.”Andthis is why we really can’t talk about
reconciliation between human beings until we talk about how God reconciles us,
because the writers of the Bible keep taking us back to that as our model.They keep taking us backto a point, and saying, ‘this is what you must remember, and that’s
then what motivates you to do these other things.’If you have tender mercies and
kindness and humility and meekness and longsuffering, bearing with one another
and forgiving one another, why?Because
we go back to ‘that’s what God did through Christ for us, so I must then model that
behavior with others.’Well you
say, ‘That’s uncomfortable.’It was uncomfortable for God to do what he
did.There’s nothing that says that
Jesus Christ was comfortable when he did what he did.There’s nothing that says God the Father was
comfortable when he did what he did.He
did what he did because that’s who he is.He did what he did because it’s his nature.And you and I have a corrupt nature that’s
supposed to become like his.This is his
nature to do this.He didn’t say it was
comfortable for him to do it.We know it
wasn’t comfortable for Jesus Christ to do it.And now we have to break this concept down, and say ‘OK, now how do I live it with
other people?I want to accept God’s
reconciliation, how God came to save me while I was yet a sinner and an
enemy.But now how am I to apply that to
fellow Christians?’ because we are a family.So family must apply these same principles
that the Father and the Elder Brother has already applied to us.And that means real peace comes from first
seeking peace with God. So when someone has hurt you and damaged you, first go
get peace with from God.That’s where
you go first, not to the person, you go to God first.‘God,
this person has hurt me, this person,’ just like a little kid, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ I hear that all
the time, ‘you know what’ fill in the
child’s name, ‘did to me!?’We go to God, and we say ‘Father, it hurts, I’ve been damaged.’And then we remember Jesus Christ says ‘Oh, I know what that’s like.’‘And
this person spitefully used me.’ ‘I know
what that’s like.’‘And this person
called me names.’‘I know what that’s
like.’‘And this person yelled at
me.’‘I know what that’s like.’‘By the way, did they nail you to a
cross?’‘Oh no.’‘I know what that’s like.’And all of a sudden it changes things,
doesn’t it?‘Did they nail you to a stake.’‘No.’‘Did they beat you until
they couldn’t even recognize you were a human being?’‘Well no.’‘Iknow what that’s like.’‘Did they spit on you.’‘No.’‘I know what that’s like.’You
get a little different perspective when you go there.And then he says, ‘I know how you feel, that feels terrible when people do that to you.’So we’re going to have to learn how to do
this, ‘Let me bring some peace to you.’Peace comes from God first, we must remember
that, that’s where we must go.In Isaiah
59, go and read Isaiah 59, I won’t go there, but he talks about how Israel was
such a terrible nation, just filled with sin, and hatred, and violence.And he goes through all their sins, and says ‘You
don’t know the way of peace, and anyone who goes this way will never know the
way of peace.’There is a way of
peace.In other words, there are actions
of peace.There are thoughts of
peace.And any time we are damaged by
another human being, first go to God and receive help.You know, “by his stripes we are healed” just doesn’t mean physically.And yet the proof of that is how God will use
a physical sickness to spiritually heal us.How many times in your life, and I know there’s many of you here that
have told me, your life changed because of some physical illness, and you
couldn’t figure out why God didn’t deal with it right away, or dealt with it
the way he did it, and then later you were changed because of it, in a positive
way.God used the physical illness to
heal you spiritually.So he will use
physical illnesses to heal us spiritually.And he heals us emotionally too.There
is a way of peace we must learn, there’s a way of peace we must learn.There is a healing we must get.So when you’re damaged by a person, you go to
God, and you say, ‘By his stripes I must
be healed.Give me peace, because I’m
hurt, I’m damaged.’And we ask God
for that kind of healing.I call it the
mercy-effect.God does something to you,
and then you turn around and do it to somebody else.It’s the mercy-effect.

Now
let’s go through then, now that’s the first thing on your list.This is the reason for conflicts, because we
all have a conflict with God.We all
have a conflict with God.Now, let’s go
through the others and see how then I must deal with, or you must deal with
each other when we have damaged each other.This is going to happen, and it’s going to happen over and over and over
again.And until we learn this, guess
what we will do?We will damage each
other, and we will, if we don’t deal with it properly, we’ll just have damaged
homes, damaged marriages, damaged children, damaged congregations, where
everybody’s walking around with these open emotional wounds.So we go to God when someone has hurt us, to
receive peace from him.That now gives
us the power, the ability to now deal with the situation.The second reason for conflict is our need
to control the response of the other person.This is very difficult.Because this is the fear that we have.I know this, because I’ve done this myself.Because if I give up trying to force that
person into the response I want, they’ll get away with it. If I give it up, if
I can’t force them into what I think they should do, they’ll get away with
it.And so what happens is, your
personal healing depends entirely upon the other person.They either apologize to you and heal you, or
they get punished and that heals you.But the only healing comes from both things.Now, understand the difference between
justice and vengeance.This is a big
subject, and I’m just going to touch on it.Justice is justice.You and I are
walking around suffering penalties from sins we’ve committed.Now the ultimate justice is that God would
require our eternal lives.So we have to
be careful where we go entirely with justice.But you know, if someone out here commits a murder, according to God’s
Law justice is that person forfeits their life. Anything less than forfeiting their life is
mercy, if it’s first degree murder.Now,
there are people in the Bible, like Paul, who committed murder, and were
forgiven by God.Right?God forgave him.He killed Christians.Oh he may have not picked up the stone, but
it says he consented, he gave permission, which is the same thing.[Just like Adolf Hitler or Adolf Eichmann may
have never actually killed a person, but they were guilty of multiple millions
of murders.] And God forgave him.God did not require total justice here
because he forgave him.When you forgive
somebody, that doesn’t mean you can erase the penalties they will suffer.If someone sins against you, there are
natural penalties they will suffer.And
your forgiveness of them doesn’t erase those natural penalties, that’s between
that person and God.So we’ve already
looked at forgiveness, what forgiveness is.But understand the difference between justice and vengeance.Those are two different things.I talked about that about a year ago in a
sermon, when I talked about vengeance.Vengeance is you are driven, it’s an emotional driving of who you are,
to get that person to either respond in the way that you want them to meet your
expectations, or to suffer.They must do
one or the other.They must either meet
your expectations for healing, or they must suffer.And until that happens, you will be
emotionally tortured.[Comment:That is why when some family looses a loved
one to a murderer, that family cannot usually rest until they actually witness
the execution of the murderer.That is
an emotional need for vengeance to be satisfied for those in this world who are
not indwelt with God’s Holy Spirit.This
emotional need is well understood by the justice and prison departments, and it
is allowed for by law.Corey ten Boom,
years later, while she was giving a Bible study, had a man walk up the aisle
toward her, and extended his hand to her.As he was walking up, she immediately recognized him as the Nazi prison
guard who had been responsible for her sister’s death in the concentration came
she was in with her.She sat there for a
short while, praying, obviously, and mechanically stretched out her hand in
forgiveness to this man, even though she was not feeling forgiveness.God immediately upon her taking this man’s
hand, flooded her with a forgiving spirit of loving-kindness.That is reconciliation in action.She didn’t have a lot of time to seek God’s
peace, this event happened very suddenly, and she literally had to step out in
faith before God’s peace came upon her.God didn’t let her down.]Hmmm, I
will turn you over to the torturers.You
will be emotionally tortured until one of those two things happens.Now you’re hurting.Of course you want an apology, or you want the
person to suffer.You want justice.But understand, understand, forgiving means
that you will not require that you get the justice you want.You will turn the justice over to God, and
God will mete out the justice.God will
give out the justice.And aren’t you
glad that many times God has said, ‘Oh I
forgive you, and I’ll even take the penalty away this time.’I’m glad God’s taken a lot of penalties away
from me.And we’re not even talking
about the eternal death penalty that he’s passed over with us.There’s lots of times in your life you
haven’t suffered what you should have because of your sins.There’s lots of times.Because God even took the penalty away, in
his mercy.Other times he didn’t,
because there’s lessons we have to learn.We have to learn to take responsibility for our sins.And that means there’s times we suffer
terrible penalties.There are sins we
commit where we will suffer a physical penalty for, for the rest of our lives,
until the resurrection, that’s the way it is.When someone sins against you, there is a penalty they will pay in one
form or another.[This applies also to
those in the world who sin against us.I
once worked in an electronics company, and the president of the company wanted
everyone to come into work on a particular Saturday.I did not show up, because it was the
Sabbath.He fired me.I ended up in another electronics company
about 100 miles away, had to relocate my family to get this new job.This man’s company went chapter 11, and he
was demoted to being a salesman.How did
I find out?He showed up at the company
where I now worked, hat in hand, trying to sell his company’s transformers, and
I learned all this from our sale’s rep.He actually came over and shook hands with me (rather sheepishly).This is one of many examples where the Lord
showed me not to worry about seeking justice or vengeance on my own, he had my
back.]

The Deadly Fruit of Vengeance:Collateral Damage

But
vengeance is that you require that for your own personal
feelings, ‘I require they meet my
expectations of apology, or they meet my expectations of punishment.And they must do that, or I can never be healed.’And what happens when we get like this, there’s a couple things that
happen that are very dangerous.One is,
in your need, and my need to pay back hurt with hurt, there is collateral
damage.And I wish I had a dollar for
every child, teenager, adult, elderly person that I have talked to over the
years, who talked about how they were damaged because of the battle between
their parents.The children were the
collateral damage, because of the battle between the parents.[The Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s blood-feud is
an extreme example of this.]What
happens when we are driven by vengeance and the need to get the other person to
meet our expectations or to be hurt?There are times when there’s collateral damage from that, we damage
other people.You know, Romans 12,
Romans 12, this is why I said there are times to confront people, and there’s
actually times not to.There’s times
when you leave it alone, and put it into God’s hands.We think, ‘Now
when would you do that?’Because you
wouldn’t always do that.We shouldn’t
always do that.We are required to go to
our brothers.But there are times you
don’t go to your brother.You know the
times when you don’t go to your brother?When the collateral damage is so great that it will damage other
people.And then you go put it in God’s
hands.Romans 12:17-18, “Recompense no man evil for evil.Provide things honest in the sight of all
men.If it be possible, as much as lieth
in you, live peaceably with all men.”It is not possible to live peaceably with all men, it is
impossible.So what Paul says, ‘as
much as depends on you, live in peace.Realize it’s not always going to be possible to live at peace with
people.’There are people,
especially in the world, where you can’t live at peace with them.You endure.Right?You endure those
people.You have to.“Dearly
beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath:for it is
written, Vengeance is mine; I will
repay, saith the Lord.” (verse 19)You know there are times to turn something over to God, and say, ‘If I deal with this, I’ll make it worse,
and there will be collateral damage, and therefore I will give this to you, and
I’ll ask you to take care of this.’And
then you trust that he will do what’s best.Now you know what?What if he
doesn’t punish that person right away?The moment you turned it over to God, and said‘You do what’s best,’ and if he doesn’t punish them right away, you
have to accept that’s what’s best.Right?This is what it says.Don’t take vengeance out, there’s times you
give it to God and say ‘I can’t deal with
this one, I’ll only make it worse.’Look
at what he says, “Therefore if thine
enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink:for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire
on his head.Be not overcome of evil,
but overcome evil with good.” (verses 20-12)Sometimes, sometimes in dealing with an offender,
you actually become, you repay evil with evil, and you’re overcome by the
evil.[For many of our troops, both
during World War II, especially our Marines in the Pacific, or in Vietnam, this
occurred, the responses to the evils of the enemy overcame our boys with evil,
they were never the same.]This is why
you can’t deal with some people in the world, you can’t apply these principles
all the time.Right?I mean, you’re working next door to a guy,
right there in the same building, who sleeps with every girl that he can get,
he’s a drug addict, he’s a drunk, and he offends you all the time.And there’s not much you can do about
it.You turn that over to God.You don’t get him to repent, you can’t get
him to stop being offensive.You turn it
over to God and say ‘God, you have to
take care of this.Because if I try to
deal with this I’ll loose my job.There’s no way I can fix this.’So there are times when you don’t deal with the situation
head-on.But this goes back to our need
to control the response of the other person.In fact, when we really understand this, then what Peter says in 1st Peter makes sense.1st Peter,
because we know where to go, especially to our brother.You can’t go to people all the time in the
world.You try to apply this, and you
should.But there’s times you
can’t.There’s times even with your
brother in the Church, you realize that trying to fix the offense will only
make it worse, and you say ‘OK, I’ll take
care of it later.’There’s times
when somebody offends you, and you say ‘I’ll
take care of it later.’Because, as
husband and wife, there’s times you’re offended by your husband, there’s times
you’re offended by your wife, and you’ve learned, instead of trying to deal
with it in this heated moment, the best thing for me to do is step back, and
wait, and deal with it later.Right?We learn because at that
point, you will only make it worse.And
so how we pick a time, how we pick a time to deal with offense is very
important.1st Peter 2:19 says, “For this is thankworthy, if
a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully.For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it
patiently?but if, when ye do well, and
suffer for it, ye take it patiently,
this is acceptable with God.” (verses
19-20)Patience is one of the
biggest problems that we have when we are offended.Why?Because it hurts, and we want to stop the hurt.So how do we stop the hurt?We get the person to either repent or be
punished.And when neither of those
things happen, what do we do?Well we
remember this.And you think ‘Well, how can I do that?’Now we go back to the first principles of
reconciliation. “For even hereunto were
ye called:because Christ also suffered
for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps:who did no sin, neither was guile found in
his mouth:who, when he was reviled,
reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously:
who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead
to sins, should live unto righteousness:by whose stripes ye were healed.” (verses 21-24)See what he takes us back into.I know you can’t do this by yourself, because
I can’t do this by myself.Go back to
this, we remember this, and he says sometimes you give it to God, who judges
righteously.There are times when you
give it to God.There are times when
there’s no solution to a problem with an offender.There are times when there’s so much
collateral damage that the more you try to fix it the more people you
hurt.And he says there are times then,
you just turn it over to God.That’s how
we give up our need to control the response of the other person.That’s why the first step is you have to go
get healing from God when someone has hurt you.The second step is you have to give up the need, the absolute need to
control it, the vengeance that says ‘I have to have this response or this.’I’ve seen situations go on for years, and
finally someone goes to someone and says ‘Hey,
I did this years ago, and I’m sorry.’And
they solved it, and all the hurt’s gone, and you think ‘Wow, they spent two years mad at each other, and all they had to do is
that.’All they had to do is
that.The third point, is that we need
to seek God’s solution instead of our solution to fulfill our desires.Remember, our desires are part of the problem
that we have.Our desires are not always
wrong, but we’re driven by them.

When We’re Offended We Must Analyze What Is
Happening---How Did I Contribute To This?

When
you are offended by someone, you need to analyze why you were offended.Now this is real hard folks, one of the
hardest things for a corrupted human nature.At least for me, and maybe you don’t have this problem, so I do this for
me.One of the hardest things for me is
intellectual honesty.You do need to
analyze intellectually, honestly what is happening.Because I truly believe my subjectivity is
objective.I believe it.So when you are offended, here’s a series of
questions to ask yourself and answer before you do anything.1. One, what is the Christ-like response to
this situation?‘Oh, oh, wait a minute, Christ-like response?I need to go deal with that so and so.’ What is the Christ-like response?Because when we deal with someone whose
sinned against us, we’re trying to reconcile.So what are we trying to do?In
the Church, what are we trying to do when someone has sinned against us?We are trying to reconcile.If you’re just trying to punish someone,
you’re missing the point.Now, like I’ve
said, all sin gets punishment.You don’t
have to worry about it.We all get our
punishment for sin.So what is it you’re
trying to do when someone has offended you?The first step is, you’re trying to reconcile with them.Now that means they have to deal with their
sin.So what is the Christ-like
response?2. The second question you
have to ask yourself is, What lessons can
God teach me through this situation?Sometimes you’re going, you know everything in life we go through we can
learn something from it.And so, we need
to ask, ‘What am I learning from this?’Maybe in this person sinning against me I
have an opportunity here to grow in what God wants me to learn.3. A third question you have to ask yourself
is, ‘Am I overreacting?Am I overreacting?Is this really a little thing, and I’m making
it big [making a mountain out of a mole-hill principle]?4. The next question, ‘Am I reacting out of frustration, because I
expect the other person to fulfill my desires?I’m offended because I expected him to buy me roses for our anniversary,
and he showed up with some daisies he picked out of the front yard, and thought
I’d be impressed with them?’Now,
I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel bad [does sleeping on the couch ring a bell,
guys?].OK?I’m not saying that that, you’re expectations
weren’t met.But, am I now offended and
have dysfunctional conflict, because my desires weren’t met?5. ‘Am
I angered because my pride was injured? Is that the real issue here?’Am I angry because my pride was
injured?6.‘Is
this an offense I should simply overlook?’ You know, the Bible does talk about
overlooking offenses.In fact, in
Proverbs it talks about how it is a prudent man, a wise man, who overlooks
offenses.I mean, he doesn’t overlook
all of them.But you know, there are
just a lot of offenses that aren’t worth it.The person is tired, the person is stressed out.I’ve seen people do things where they’re
stressed they would never normally do.And many times, what’s the best way to deal with that?‘Ah,
he’s just stressed, just leave him alone.They’ll be ok tomorrow.’Right?And we just leave it alone.It doesn’t matter that the person just said, ‘Leave me alone, just don’t talk to me you
stupid jerk!’And you say, ‘That’s not normal, I don’t know what the
problem is, but maybe tomorrow he’ll feel better and he can tell me what’s
wrong.’We overlook offenses, and there’s many times
we’re supposed to overlook offenses.We cut
people slack. 7. And then the question we don’t want to ask ourselves is ‘How did I contribute to this
conflict?’‘Wait a minute, that’s the
person who did wrong!’But you know,
many times someone’s offense doesn’t come out of a vacuum.There has been conflict that’s been going on
for a long time, and the offense isn’t out of a vacuum.So ask, ‘So
how did I contribute to this?Maybe I
contributed to this somehow.’And
maybe you didn’t.But you have to ask
yourself that question.You have to be intellectually
honest enough, which means you had to first of all go to God and get some
peace.Secondly, you’ve had to give up, ‘No, I’m not going to be emotionally driven
to have vengeance here.’And then
you have to go to this point that says, ‘OK,
I just analyzed this so that I can begin to try to find God’s solution, instead
of fulfilling my desires.’I mean,
this last point, is exactly what Jesus meant in the Sermon on the Mount.He said ‘Don’t try to remove the speck out of your
brother’s eye, until you get the beam out of yours.’Now why did he say that?He said, ‘Then go get the speck out,’ he
didn’t say ignore the offense, he
said, ‘figure out how you contributed.’You know, your brother may be blinded because you smacked him in
the head with the 2 x 4 sticking out of your eye!So deal with your part of the offense
first.Your part of the offense may have
been tiny.It doesn’t matter how big it
was.You deal with that first.‘Wow,
can’t I just go tell my brother he’s a sinner?’If we do this the way God did with us, we have to do these things
first.

Be Real Cautious About Anger Turning Into
Bitterness

And
then the last point of course is, seek God’s healing for your damaged
emotions.Now that brings us right back
to the first point. But you know, these
five points are all interconnected.As
we go on, you’ll see they’re connected more and more and more together, and the
answers come from God.Sometimes people
won’t repent.Sometimes relationships
are broken, and can’t be fixed.Sometimes
relationships are broken and can’t be fixed.The person who did the abuse, the person who damaged other people didn’t
care.We’ve all seen that kind of thing
happen.Haven’t we?And the person just says ‘I don’t care.’And we must
realize that we must seek God’s help.Because if we don’t, we end up in some real trouble.We end up allowing ourselves being controlled
by anger.I gave a whole sermon on anger
awhile back, so I won’t go through that.But when we get controlled by anger, just do a study on the word “anger”
and “wrath” in the Bible.Not all anger
is wrong.We should be angry at
times.We actually should be.But boy anger becomes very dysfunctional very
quickly.I know that, you know that,
we’ve all been there, we’ve all been there.But one of the things that really happens to us is that when the
situation can’t be solved, we become bitter.I want you to look at something in Hebrews chapter 12.See bitterness is a state of mind that’s
rooted in unresolved anger.Hebrews chapter 12, you know when you
think about God, there are human beings that will not repent.There are human beings who are going to the
lake of fire.Is he bitter towards them?Verse
14, Hebrews 12, “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord:” Now this is one sentence with two subjects,
peace and holiness.They’re connected
together here.We must pursue peace and
holiness.We pursue those two things,
because without these two things, you and I will not see Christ.“Looking
diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness
springing up trouble you, and thereby
many be defiled.”(verse 15)Fall short of the grace of God, now we know
how people do that.Right?They blaspheme God, they go out into a
lifestyle that is an absolute rejection of God.We know that people can loose God’s Spirit.The Book of Hebrews talks about this more
than any other book in the Bible, where you can lose God’s grace, you can give
up God’s grace.But I want you to notice
what the rest of this sentence says.‘Looking
carefully lest anyone falls short of the grace of God, lest any root of
bitterness springing up cause trouble, and by this,’ now he’s writing
to the Church, ‘by this many become defiled.’Because of bitterness, he said, the writer of
Hebrews said to the Church ‘many people in the Church have become
defiled.’This is a scary
statement here.This is a statement
about salvation.We can lose salvation
through bitterness, by just becoming bitter people, people who always see
nothing but bad, have no faith in God because there’s always going to be bad
anyway.They have no love towards God,
we do it because we have to, they have no real relations with people because ‘They’ll abuse me anyways.’Everybody just mistreats them anyways [in
their own minds].They never reach out,
they never love anybody else.‘So we come to church, we try to keep the
Ten Commandments, and we sort of just go through life with this
bitterness.’And they’re never
really experiencing any of the joy of God’s Spirit.And because of this he says, ‘many
become defiled.’

What Is The Quickest Way To Bitterness?

What
is the quickest way to bitterness?Here’s the irony of it.To have
someone sin against you, to have someone abuse you, have someone do something
bad against you, and then you can’t get it resolved, is the quickest way to
bitterness.I’ve seen it happen a
hundred times in the Church.I’ve dealt
with so many situations between people, and watch somebody get bitter, husband
and wife, friends who knew each other for years, family members.I’ve seen family members hate each other
because a funeral comes up, and they fight over who gets the trinkets, and they
hate each other, and they’re bitter toward each other.I’m always amazed at that.I think I’ve told you before, because of
that, I told my sisters, you get everything.Anything you want me to have or you give to me is fine, you get everything.I willnot risk damaging our relationship over things that my parents
have.Because I’ve seen it too many
times.Bitterness is a terrible
thing.Because remember what it does, it
locks you in a dark room spiritually, where all you do is think about the hurt,
and all you do is see other people hurting you, and all you do is spend your
time looking out at how other people treat you.A mature Christian concerns his or her life on how he or she treats
others.Bitterness turns that around,
until your whole concern in life is how others treat you.And the thing is, we get that way because
we’re damaged.We get that way because
someone did something bad to us.It
doesn’t excuse what the other person did.But it’s how we end up.And
because of that we do something else.We
begin to involve others in our discontent.We must always involve others in and try to make the others bitter.[He’s not saying this is something we should
do, but something bitter people end up doing.]I’ve seen people do that, I’ve sat in a congregation where a bunch of
people are rallied around this person, and a bunch of people are rallied around
that person, and all they do is come to Sabbath services and talk about ‘Well this person mistreated that
person.’And they’ve got two little
groups, I’ve seen it happen before.It
shouldn’t be in the Church of God, we’re sharing bitterness.

Pride:It’s
Not Always About Winning

The
last point is about pride.And that
means we must seek humility.It’s not
always about winning.One final
Scripture, Genesis 26.It’s not always
about winning.It’s not always about
coming out on top.It’s not always about
getting it resolved exactly the way you and I want to get it resolved.It’s accepting the imperfections of life.It’s accepting that seldom does any situation
end up exactly the way you would like it to end up, and be happy anyways, and
be happy anyways.Most things don’t work
out exactly the way you want them to, and you know what?---most things don’t
work out exactly the way God would want them to.[If you’re a Calvinist, or have Calvinist leanings,
he just blew your mind J]You ever think about that?You can look at the Bible and see how God
wants things handled.Very seldom does
anything turn out the way he would want it done.Yet, he doesn’t, you know, he’s not
bitter.He’s upset, he carries out
justice, he punishes people.But he’s
not a bitter, distraught, angry, hateful being.And, praise God for us that he’s not.Because just think about what life would be like for you and me, think
about that.Genesis 26, verse 16, “And Abimelech said unto Isaac, Go from us; for
thou art much mightier than we.”Isaac was being blessed, his family was growing, he has a nomadic tribe,
he has servants and so forth, he has hundreds of sheep and goats and so forth,
and finally Abimelech and the Philistines said, ‘You’ve got to move out of our
town here, you’re bigger than us.’“And
Isaac departed from thence, and pitched his tent in the valley of Gerar, and
dwelt there.And Isaac digged again the
wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for
the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham, and he called
their names after the names which his father had called them.”So Abraham had dug wells, they were his
wells, ah, when they moved away, they were a nomadic tribe, they moved around,
the Philistines had come in and filled in the wells. ‘That means old Abraham won’t show up anymore, because we filled in his
wells.’Well Isaac goes out and digs
up the wells again.Also Isaac’s
servants dug in the valley and found a well of running water there.He discovers a brand new well of running
water, which in that part of the world is very rare, and you know, water is
life.Well you would think people would
be happy.But the herdsmen of Gerar
quarreled with Isaac’s herdsmen, saying, ‘the water is ours.’They called the name of the place
Esek, which basically means ‘We had a
fight.’Now, I know what I would
think if I was Isaac.‘First of all, this is Abraham’s land, God
gave it to me, ah, these are my wells.I
might share them with you, but if you’re going to take them, come and get
‘em.’My sword would have been
out.Or he could have said, ‘Hey,’ and knowing Isaac I’m surprised
he didn’t do this, ‘I’ll sell you some
water.’[laughter]I know Jacob would have said that.‘I’ll
sell you some water.’But what did
Isaac do?Then they dug another well,
and so he moved on and dug another well.And they quarreled over that one.You know, you just had to live with these people.I want you to think about something
here.He had every right to win.But he realized, for one thing in that part
of the world, if you started a feud, you had a blood-feud, all he had to do is
kill somebody from that other nomadic tribe, and guess what?---they’d have been
at war for generations.That would have
gone on and on and on and on. He had to live with these people.And he decided not wining here was the best
thing to do, not winning was the best thing to do.He had the wells that Abraham had dug, those
were his.These new wells, he was
walking away from them.[read verses
16-22]He had every right to say ‘That’s my well!’He had every right even to think of saying ‘That’s my well!’They were his wells.And then, verse 22, “And he removed from thence and digged another well; and for
that they strove not:and he called the
name of it Rehoboth; and he said, For now the LORD hath made room for us, and we
shall be fruitful in the land.”And no one quarreled over this
one, everyone said, ‘You know,what a guy, he dug a well and let us have
it.’He dug a well over here, and
everybody backed off.Because of his
willingness not to fight for his rights at those points, eventually something
good happened.There’s a time to make a
stand for right and wrong, there’s a time to confront a brother who has sinned,
and we’ll go through that.We are
required at times to confront our brothers who have sinned, we’re actually
required to do so.But there’s a time to
say, ‘This isn’t about winning, this
really isn’t.’And notice what
happened.‘And they did not quarrel over
it.So he called the name Rehoboth,
because he said ‘For now the LORD has made room for us, and we
shall be fruitful in the land.’’God gave him a well.God gave him the best.God gave him a better well.And he said, ‘You know, God’s taken care of me
in this.God’s taken care of me in
this.’What an important
lesson.When it comes to pride, it’s not
always about winning.It’s not always
about winning.It’s about learning how
to live together.It’s not
always having to be right, even when you are right.That’s the hard part.It’s not always about being right, even when
you are right, because it’s about living together.And he had to live with these people.These nomadic tribes would be moving all over
the place, crossing each other’s paths.He didn’t want them, every time they saw each other everybody had to go
grab their weapons.He didn’t want that.Important lesson when it comes to pride.

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